South Korean leader ‘will be forced to respond’

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell examines North Korea’s brewing threats and what they mean for neighboring South Korea.

Asia-Pacific

This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>>>let's talk more with our chief
foreign affairs
correspondent,
andrea mitchell
, with us from our washington newsroom tonight. andrea, you've been following this back-and-forth for years. and again in
plain english
as we posed at the top of the broadcast, doesn't it make a huge difference between figuring out whether he's serious or not, this 28-year-old?

>>exactly. that's the problem, brian. because the real danger area is that you have basically a man-child with a finger on
nuclear weapons
. he has to prove himself to some in his own military, and he's only in his late 20s. he was made a four-
star general
and president overnight of a
nuclear nation
that is her mettically sealed. he doesn't know much about how the world works. that's why we saw him in ian's piece meeting with his generals in front of a map showing u.s. cities that he couldn't possibly target, but clearly this is for domestic reasons. the real worry is miscalculation, and you've got a newly installed
south korean
woman president, their first woman leader, and she will be forced to respond. and that's the real problem we've got. their army, and we are faced off against them.